Everything about Flash

Two new major Flash Platform releases have occurred: a new version of the Flash Builder development tool and a brand new product: Adobe Scout! This is part of the larger Adobe Game Developer Tools initiative – part of the Creative Cloud.

In the past, we’ve been able to attach a local camera to Video display objects within Flash Player with relative ease. The flash.media.Video object, of course, is part of the traditional display list and is not accelerated by the system GPU whatsoever. Using the newer flash.media.StageVideo object, we can implement a GPU-accelerated video display beneath the Flash display list… but previous to Flash Player 11.4 we haven’t been able to attach a camera to StageVideo as we could with Video. Thankfully, now we can!

Project Monocle (codename) is an upcoming tool from Adobe to profile ActionScript 3 (Flash Player and AIR) applications on both desktop and mobile. It provides an amazing level of insight into just about all aspecs of an application across time. If you would like a general overview of its capabilities, here is a nice video.

During my Flash gaming workshop at the Adobe Education Leader Institute, we built out a little game which covers the following game development concepts; Timing, Mouse Interaction, Character Movement, Rotation, Scrolling Backgrounds, Obstacles, Collision Detection, Game Loop, Scoreboard, Player Health, Sound Management, States, Constraints, Packages/Classes, Garbage Collection, and Game Cleanup!

Automated UI Tester for Adobe ActionScript is a pure ActionScript 3.0 SWF automation testing tool with the capability of recording user actions on an SWF file and playing them back with high fidelity.

Adobe rolled out a bunch of new Flash goodies on the Labs site this evening; a new version of SWF Investigator, a Configurator release candidate, and the first betas of Flash Player 11.5 and AIR 3.5! We also have a new updater for Flash Professional CS6 and the announcement of the Adobe Game Jams… phew!

Looking at getting into gaming using Flash, Unity, or HTML5? Want to see some great examples of gaming using these and other tech? Want full source code for all these examples to learn from? If any of this interests you – you’ll be happy to have a look at the 1400+ games developed during Ludum Dare #24 this past weekend.

We’re looking all the way back to Flash Player 10.2 for a peek at native mouse cursor support! This feature allows us to use bitmap based mouse cursors that run at the OS level rather than inside the display list in Flash Player. Huge performance gains!

Now that Adobe Creative Suite CS6 has been released, here is a little round-up of content from myself and others that you can use to get started with Flash Professional CS6!